On 6 September, within a month of Aurangzeb’s withdrawal from Bijapur, Shah Jahan fell ill, so grievously that rumours sped throughout India that he faced imminent death. From an early age Mughal princes were acutely aware that their brothers, though possibly playmates in childhood, would become deadly enemies when their father died. And they well understood that only one of them would survive the struggle to succeed him: according to the well-known Persian proverb, it was ‘either the throne, or the coffin’ (ya takht, ya takhta). The news of the emperor’s illness therefore sparked a four-way struggle among Shah Jahan’s four sons, India’s bloodiest and most notorious war of succession.
If Aurangzeb’s disputes with his father frustrated the prince, they were at least limited mainly to matters of public policy, diplomacy and administration. His relationship with Dara Shukoh, by contrast, had deteriorated to a poisonous, mutual hatred. But until the last year of Dara’s life, their rivalry had not concerned religion. Both brothers respected and were patrons of spiritual specialists of all traditions. Dara Shukoh famously consorted with Brahmin pundits and eminent Sufi shaikhs, in particular those of the Qadiri order. Aurangzeb issued dozens of documents between 1659 and 1703 supporting a variety of religious individuals and institutions: Jain saints, sadhus and monasteries (maths), temple Brahmins, gosains (wandering ascetics), Jangams (Śaiva priests), Hindu preceptors and yogis.20 Both brothers had thoroughly imbibed the culture of institutional Sufism. Dara authored three treatises and two biographical dictionaries on the subject, while Aurangzeb throughout his life patronized Sufi shrines and revered holy men.21 The bitter antagonism between the brothers took a religious turn only once the War of Succession had begun. This was due partly to heightened antagonisms triggered by the war itself, and partly to the evolution of Dara’s own religious thinking.
François Bernier, the French physician who briefly served Dara Shukoh during the War of Succession, noticed that the prince was constantly surrounded by Brahmins, to whom he gave large pensions. He also described him as a religious chameleon, outwardly professing Islam, but privately ‘a Gentile [Hindu] with Gentiles, and a Christian with Christians’.22 But the true extent of Dara’s religious adventurism lies in his treatises. One of his preoccupations centred on a classic theme of Indian philosophy: the problem of how to reconcile the renunciation of the world, necessary for achieving spiritual liberation, with engagement in the world, necessary for upholding and maintaining a functioning society. Even for ordinary householders, this tension could be a source of anxiety; but for a ruler charged with overseeing the social order of an entire kingdom, the contradiction could be especially acute. For Dara, this anxiety came to a head in late 1653. While returning to north India from Afghanistan, where he had just led a failed effort to recapture Kandahar from the Iranians, he passed through Lahore, where he visited a Punjabi holy man, Baba Lal. In the wake of his stunning defeat at Kandahar, the prince would have been acutely aware of the tension between his spiritual life and the demands of rulership, especially since Shah Jahan had been grooming him for the throne.23 The questions he put to Baba Lal therefore focused principally on the compatibility of rulership and renunciation.24 Baba Lal advised Dara that in every religious community a spiritually perfected person stands out from the common mass, and through that person’s blessings the community is saved by God.25 This assertion seems to have furnished Dara with a cogent solution to the renunciation vs engagement dilemma, for in his treatise Sakinat al-auliya the prince emphasized that, among Mughal rulers, he alone had been divinely chosen for a special spiritual role.26 By 1655 he was already referring to himself in exalted terms, including king (shah), a highly accomplished saint and ‘the perfect manifestation of virtuous conduct’.27 In short, as the inevitable struggle for succession to the Peacock Throne drew near, an important part of Dara’s political calculation appears to have been to present himself as someone who had access to divine secrets unavailable to other mortals.28
Dara Shukoh’s final intellectual project, completed just months before Shah Jahan fell ill, was the capstone of his religious explorations – an audacious reformulation of the foundations of Islam itself. In a sense, his ‘discoveries’ of the roots of Islam logically followed from his studies of princely dialogues with ascetics and his fashioning of himself as a spiritually accomplished Perfect Man (a Sufi conception) and an Indian saint-king. In his treatise Sirr-i akbar (‘The Greatest Secret’), Dara discusses his quest for the roots of monotheism in all human societies. After researching Judaic, Christian, Islamic and Indian traditions, he claims finally to have found such roots in ancient Indian scriptures, namely the Upanishads, which comprise the essence of the four Vedas.29 In 1656–7 he assembled a group of learned Brahmins of Benares and translated essential parts of the Upanishads into Persian. He also seized upon a Qur’anic passage stating that the Qur’an itself is ‘in a hidden Book [that] none but the purified shall touch, a sending down from the Lord of all Being’.30 Placing this passage side by side with his monotheistic reading of the Upanishads, Dara convinced himself that the ‘hidden Book’ mentioned in the Qur’an was in fact the Upanishads.31
Dara’s researches and striking conclusions had unexpected consequences. A copy of his Persian translation of the Upanishads was later acquired by the French Orientalist A. H. Anquetil-Duperron (d. 1805), who in turn translated it into Latin, a copy of which found its way to the library and even the bedside of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (d. 1860). By such circuitous pathways, interest in ancient Indian philosophy quickened in nineteenth-century Europe.32 In India, however, Dara’s ideas that a full understanding of Islam depended upon the study of the Upanishads, and that those scriptures anticipated Islamic monotheism, were seen by many as theologically deviant. Foremost among these was his younger brother and most dangerous rival. On the conclusion of the War of Succession, and only a year after the Sirr-i akbar was completed, Aurangzeb invoked Dara’s naming the Vedas a divine book as one of the grounds for his execution.33
Leading up to the succession struggle, however, Dara’s greatest difficulties were political, as his arrogance and immature behaviour alienated the very nobles whose support he would have needed in his final confrontations with Aurangzeb. He told the Mughals’ powerful Rajput ally Jai Singh (d. 1667), the Kachhwaha raja of Amber, that he looked like a musician, a serious insult. The raja remained quiet at the time, but was said to have determined on vengeance, which he would later have. The prince also ridiculed Mir Jumla, ordering his staff to mock the general’s gait and gestures; he too would turn against Dara, as would other prominent nobles.34 Danishmand Khan (d. 1670) resigned as cavalry captain because of Dara’s anger at him for upholding Shah Jahan’s absolute authority. Owing to some real or imaginary affront, Shaista Khan (d. 1694) greatly disliked Dara and gladly contributed to his downfall. Most seriously, perhaps, Dara on one occasion committed the unforgivable affront of beating Khalil Allah Khan (d. 1662) with his shoe. At a crucial point in the pivotal Battle of Samugarh (1658), the Uzbek commander would take his revenge by advising Dara, for his ‘personal safety’, to dismount from his elephant and mount a horse. As Khalil Allah expected, Dara’s men could no longer see their leader and so, assuming he had been killed, panicked and fled the battlefield.35
To be sure, when hostilities eventually broke out, Dara did enjoy the support of Shah Jahan and those nobles present at court. No matter what their private sympathies might have been, the latter were at least nominally loyal to the eldest prince. Residing in Delhi, the empire’s geographical and administrative centre, also gave Dara logistical assets such as the ability to control the flow of information to and from the court. But such advantages were offset by his military and political incompetence, in contrast to Aurangzeb’s extensive military experience, his known abilities as a commander, his superior skills in political networking and his cool, calculating character. Manucci described Aurangzeb as totally different from his brothers, ‘very secretive and serious, carrying on his affairs in a hidden way, but most energetically. He was of a melancholy temperament, always busy at something or another.’36 And François Bernier: ‘Aureng-Zebe … was devoid of that urbanity and engaging presence, so much admired in Dara; but he possessed a sounder judgment, and was more skillful in selecting for confidants such persons as were best qualified to serve him with faithfulness and ability.’ The Frenchman added that ‘his life had been one of undeviating intrigue and contrivance; conducted, however, with such admirable skill, that every person in the court, excepting only his brother, Dara, seemed to form an erroneous estimate of his character.’37
Accordingly, in the months after September 1657, when news of Shah Jahan’s illness sped throughout the realm, Aurangzeb prudently held back from committing himself to a succession struggle, even though by early December his brothers Murad and Shuja‘ had both impetuously crowned themselves emperor and were mobilizing armies to march on Agra and Delhi. From Bengal Shuja‘ was the first to advance towards these cities, prompting Dara to send his son Sulaiman Shukoh and top generals down the Ganges valley to check the threat, which they did in February 1658. In Gujarat, meanwhile, Murad had extorted money from merchants of the wealthy seaport of Surat in order to finance his own invasion of the capital. In Delhi, Dara, acting in the name of the ailing Shah Jahan and seeking to defang the brother he feared most, recalled Shaista Khan and Mir Jumla from the Deccan, unaware that both generals secretly supported Aurangzeb. He also persuaded Jaswant Singh, the Rathor raja of Marwar, to lead a Mughal army to check Murad’s northward advance from Gujarat. But, as late as March 1658, Aurangzeb held back in Burhanpur, extorting money from Bijapur for his own army while secretly conspiring with Murad to join their two armies, defeat Dara and divide the empire between them. Meanwhile his sister and ally Raushanara was smuggling messages out of Delhi, evading Dara’s spies and roadblocks and informing Aurangzeb as to their eldest brother’s actions and intentions.
In late March 1658, Aurangzeb finally left Burhanpur for north India – not, ostensibly, as a contender for the throne like Murad and Shuja‘, but as the dutiful son piously paying a visit to his ailing father. In mid April his army joined that of Murad south of Ujjain, and several days later, at the Battle of Dharmat, their combined forces of 40,000 completely routed an imperial force of the same size fighting on behalf of Dara. Although Murad fought well in this engagement, it was Aurangzeb’s reputation as an accomplished field commander that coursed through the empire’s informal networks, much to Dara’s dismay. In late May Aurangzeb and Murad crossed the Chambal, cleverly skirting Dara’s artillery defences along that river’s usual crossing points. At this point Shah Jahan offered personally to go out and persuade the two princes to return to their provincial postings, it being unthinkable that any of his sons would challenge their father in battle. But Dara, ever haughty and over-confident in his military abilities, brushed off his father’s offer. The calm eldest sister, Jahanara, also intervened, writing to Aurangzeb that ‘according to the Islamic law and convention the elder brother has the status of a father. His Majesty holds the same view.’ But this was a flawed argument. The shari‘a has no law of primogeniture; moreover, as everybody knew, the Turko-Mongol tradition as refined by Akbar gave all sons of a reigning monarch an equal right to inherit the empire. So Aurangzeb wrote to his father, protesting that whereas he merely wished to visit His Majesty, Dara had mobilized a vast army to prevent his progress towards Agra.38
But the time for meaningful negotiations had passed. The brothers were bent on war, and on 29 May their armies clashed near the village of Samugarh, thirty-five kilometres south-east of Agra. Although Dara’s forces of 60,000 far surpassed in number those of Aurangzeb and Murad, his men, unlike the invaders from Gujarat and the Deccan, had been hastily assembled and were not at all battle-hardened. Worse, some of his leading officers secretly supported Aurangzeb. The battle’s progress therefore proved disastrous for Dara, whose forces were swept off the field by late afternoon. The prince himself galloped off to Agra. Too ashamed to face his father after his crushing defeat, a dispirited Dara slipped out of the fort that same night and headed towards Delhi with a handful of supporters. Next came days of tortuous negotiations between Aurangzeb, who now held most of the political cards, and Shah Jahan, still in his palace in Agra but suddenly reduced to the pitiable state of an emperor with no empire. Acting as intermediary, Jahanara conveyed to Aurangzeb the emperor’s last-ditch proposal to divide the empire among his four sons.39 But it was too late for such ideas: the princes all understood that this was a winner-take-all contest. Nonetheless, a direct face-to-face interview between the drama’s principal actors was arranged. Aurangzeb had actually saddled up and was riding towards the Agra fort to meet his father when he was handed an intercepted message from Shah Jahan to Dara, in which the emperor advised his eldest son to collect an army in Delhi and stay there while he concluded his negotiations with Aurangzeb. Such evidence of his father’s continued collusion with Dara convinced Aurangzeb that he was walking into a trap. So he aborted the intended interview and instead ordered his men to take possession of all royal effects, treasures and so on, and to keep the emperor confined in the palace.40 Until his death seven years later, Shah Jahan would never again leave the fort.
By 10 June 1658 the War of Succession was effectively over. On that day Aurangzeb felt sufficiently confident of his tightening grip on power to hold in his camp a grand darbar, or public audience, where, though not yet crowned, he behaved as though he were already sovereign, presenting himself for public viewing, receiving hosts of courtiers and making appointments. But two obstacles blocked any easy transition to the Peacock Throne. The first was political. Of his three brothers, two were at large – Dara in Delhi, reportedly reassembling an army to challenge the outcome at Samugarh; and Shuja‘ in Bengal, checked by a Mughal army four months earlier, but said to be preparing to resume his bid for power. Though courageous and successful in combat, his younger brother, Murad, was impetuous, gullible and increasingly unhappy about his role of playing second fiddle to Aurangzeb. Since Murad was near at hand, he was the first to be dealt with. Three days after his darbar in Agra, Aurangzeb set off for Delhi in pursuit of Dara, with Murad and his army tagging along several kilometres behind. On the pretext of celebrating their joint victory over Dara, Aurangzeb treacherously invited the unsuspecting Murad to a sumptuous feast, after which his guest was shackled in his slumber and ultimately dispatched to the Mughals’ state prison in Gwalior.
Dara, however, would remain a fugitive for the next fourteen months, his condition growing ever more desperate and miserable. Armies that he hastily assembled on the run, using treasures he had either carried with him or seized from former political servants, dwindled progressively towards the vanishing point. Aurangzeb pursued his quarry to Lahore and then to Multan, which he reached in mid September 1658. But Dara stayed just ahead of him, continuing down the Indus valley with an army that rapidly shrank from 14,000 in Lahore to just 3,000. In Multan, Aurangzeb learnt that Shuja‘, realizing that none of his brothers was occupying Agra or Delhi, had left his base in Bengal and was again marching up the Ganges valley. So Aurangzeb abruptly rushed back to Delhi and thence to what is now Faizabad District, Uttar Pradesh, where he joined the army of his old ally Mir Jumla. At the Battle of Khajwa on 5 January 1659, the allies confronted and defeated Shuja‘, who for the next four months, pursued by Mir Jumla, fell back into the Bengal forests and finally fled to Burma’s Arakan coastal region, where he vanished from historical record.
That left only Dara for Aurangzeb to contend with. While Shuja‘ was being driven through Bengal, the eldest contender experienced a brief comeback. Having crossed the salt marshes between Sind and Gujarat, he found support for a renewed attempt on the crown in Ahmedabad. Maharaja Jaswant Singh had first fought on Dara’s behalf at Dharmat, then switched to supporting Aurangzeb, but then deserted the latter at Khajwa. Now he again offered to help Dara. Although the fugitive prince might have thought better of relying on one with such fickle loyalties, the man was desperate, and so in February 1659 he marched north expecting Jaswant Singh’s army to join his own remnants at Ajmer. By the time he got there, though, Aurangzeb had already cautioned the Rajput general against supporting his brother. Like most other Mughal nobles, Jaswant Singh clearly saw which prince it was more prudent to back, and so abandoned Dara to his fate. In mid March Dara bravely staged one last stand at Deorai, just south of Ajmer, but Rajputs fighting with Aurangzeb ultimately outmanoeuvred him. Pursued this time by Maharaja Jai Singh, Dara fled back to Gujarat, retracing his steps across the salt marsh to southern Sind. Reduced to a band of hardly a hundred followers, Dara headed north hoping to find support in Afghanistan. But in early June, near the mouth of the Bolan Pass, a zamindar whom Dara thought he could trust betrayed him to Aurangzeb’s men, and in August he was taken to Delhi in chains. There he was publicly paraded through the streets and bazaars of Shahjahanabad, wearing coarse cloth and mounted on a miserable, worn-out elephant. François Bernier, who witnessed the spectacle, remarked on the public weeping and lamenting for Dara’s wretched fate. Yet nobody made any move to rescue the doomed prince, despite there being hardly any troops guarding him.41 After a council of clerics drew up a list of charges against him, he was executed on 30 August 1659, and his body was buried in the grounds of Humayun’s tomb.42
On 13 May, three months before Dara’s execution, but several months after that prince’s last stand at Deorai, Aurangzeb had staged a grand coronation ceremony in Delhi, officially inaugurating his reign [see Fig. 20].43 He chose as his imperial title “Alamgir’ (‘world-conqueror’), apparently in memory of a sword, inscribed with that title, that his father had given him after the decisive Battle of Samugarh a year earlier.44
‘ALAMGIR’S EARLY REIGN
Having trod his bloody path to the Peacock Throne, the new emperor moved swiftly to consolidate his power and assert his claims to legitimacy. First, he richly rewarded the nobles who had aided him during the two years’ struggle and pardoned those who had supported any of his brothers. To maintain administrative continuity with Shah Jahan’s regime, he retained his father’s last finance minister, Raja Raghunath, whom he repeatedly praised for his dedication and competence. To neutralize factions within his immediate family, he arranged marriages between his own children and those of his defeated brothers: two of his daughters were married to Dara’s son Sipihr Shukoh and Murad’s son ‘Izzat Bakhsh after both were released from prison and given official ranks, while his own son Muhammad A‘zam was married to Dara’s daughter Jani Begum. His success in consolidating his authority is seen in the response to his own serious illness just three years into his reign. Although physicians despaired of his recovery, no prince or noble made any move to restore the still-confined Shah Jahan to power, far less wage another succession war on his own behalf.45
For the common population, which had been greatly unsettled by the recent political convulsions, ‘Alamgir acted with predictable generosity. ‘The doors of the imperial treasuries were opened to all people,’ writes a chronicler, adding that the new emperor celebrated his next birthday by indulging in the traditional Indian custom of having himself weighed against gold, which was distributed among the poor.46 To alleviate suffering from famine, he opened ten additional almshouses in Delhi, twelve more in surrounding districts, and still more in Lahore.47 Indicating his determination to serve justice, he ordered the public execution of 500 common thieves.48 For the benefit of merchants, he abolished road tolls on the transit of grain throughout the realm, despite a considerable loss of revenue to the state.49 And he threw himself into the minutiae of everyday administration with boundless energy. ‘Above all,’ writes Manucci, ‘he prided himself on the number of hours he spent every day in public audience, in the hearing of complaints, and in efforts to suppress the abuses existing in the empire.’50
The new emperor also embarked on a vigorous programme of imperial expansion on three frontiers. To the east, where Mughal armies had long since adapted themselves to campaigning in the river-laced forests of the great Ganges delta, ‘Alamgir sent his new governor of Bengal, Mir Jumla, up the Brahmaputra River towards Assam. In late 1661 his naval flotillas reached the provincial capital of the Ahom rajas in Kuch Bihar and annexed the surrounding territory. Early the following year his forces continued moving upriver, taking riverside forts one by one, up to the Ahom capital of Garhgaon, which fell to Mir Jumla in March 1662. But torrential rains and poor communication with Dhaka, followed by famine and disease in the imperial camp, forced the Mughals to reach a tributary arrangement with the Ahom raja, similar to those that had been concluded with Rajput chieftains since the days of Akbar. In early 1663 the expeditionary force began its return to Dhaka, but Mir Jumla died en route. Within four years the Ahom kings had renewed the war, pushing Mughal garrisons out of Assam. Despite the Mughals’ subsequent attempts to reconquer the upper Brahmaputra valley, by 1681 they had been driven out of Gauhati and Assam for good.
‘Alamgir’s forces had better luck extending the empire’s frontiers in Bengal’s south-eastern sector. In 1459 one of the delta’s oldest and finest seaports, Chittagong, had been seized from the Bengal sultans by the kings of the Arakan coast. Jahangir’s governor in Bengal, Islam Khan Chishti, had managed to recover Bengali territory up to the Feni River seventy kilometres north of Chittagong, but the port itself remained under Arakanese control. What is more, that city was being used as a staging site for Arakanese mariners and renegade Portuguese adventurers to raid lower Bengal for slaves. Therefore, Mir Jumla’s successor as Bengal governor, Shaista Khan, renovated the provincial navy, building 300 new boats in order to launch a combined naval and overland expedition to conquer Chittagong. After first seizing the island of Sandwip, in early 1666 a Mughal force of 6,500 wrested the port from the Arakanese, whose capital of Mrauk-U further down the coast had just entered a period of internal disorder, rendering them unable to recover it.
Recalling his father’s disastrous campaigns to subdue northern Afghanistan, ‘Alamgir adopted more limited goals for the empire’s north-western frontier. Protecting vital trade routes, not annexing territory, would be the strategic objective. He also reached political accommodations with the Pashtun clans inhabiting the rugged mountains beyond the Khyber Pass. Early in ‘Alamgir’s reign, though, several tribal uprisings tested imperial resolve and methods. In 1667, a chieftain of the Yusufzai lineage crowned himself king of the Swat valley and led his tribesmen across the Indus near Attock, attacking government outposts and threatening routes leading into Kashmir. Mughal counter-attacks only drew more frontier tribes into the uprising, which was finally suppressed by Mir Jumla’s son, Muhammad Amin Khan. Then in 1672 another lineage, the Afridis, rose up under Acmal Khan, who also crowned himself king, struck coins and declared war on the Mughals. This uprising was more serious, since it was proclaimed in the name of all Pashtuns. Muhammad Amin Khan, now governor of Kabul, recklessly took a huge army into a dangerous part of the Khyber Pass where Afridi tribes ambushed his force, killing 10,000 and enslaving another 20,000. Two years later the Mughals suffered another reverse, in which Indian troops unaccustomed to Afghanistan’s bitterly cold winters got caught in the snowy pass leading to Kabul and were again ambushed with heavy losses. After this, ‘Alamgir advanced to the Peshawar region, where he spent more than a year personally overseeing Mughal operations. Shrewdly pitting clan against clan, he won over tribal chieftains with gifts, lavish subsidies and promises of productive jagirs if they would enter Mughal service. Such policies did stabilize the north-west: Pashtun tribes were mostly pacified, and the caravan routes leading from the Punjab to the Iranian plateau remained open.
On the other hand, ‘Alamgir’s policies regarding two major Rajput houses – the Rathors of Marwar in western Rajasthan and the Sisodiyas of Mewar in the south – seriously strained Delhi’s relations with these long-standing Mughal allies. By mutual agreements, the emperors reserved the right to choose the ruling successor to any Rajput house with which they were tied by treaty, and by custom those choices would conform to Rajput expectations. Problems could arise, however, when a Rajput house was sharply divided over a rightful successor. In late 1678 such a crisis was touched off when Jaswant Singh, raja of Marwar, died with no surviving heir. Indra Singh, a grandson of Jaswant Singh’s disinherited elder brother, immediately advanced his claims for the succession, although his candidacy was widely opposed by Rathor clansmen. Word then arrived that in February 1679 a male child named Ajit Singh had been born to one of Jaswant Singh’s wives. Not wishing to put Marwar under a regency until the boy had attained majority, ‘Alamgir ordered the child placed under imperial custody while naming Indra Singh the state’s new raja. Many in Marwar, however, fiercely resisted the emperor’s measures, insisting that succession be restricted to direct heirs. They also rejected the emperor’s compromise proposal to partition the state between the infant Ajit Singh and Indra Singh. In July 1679 Durga Das, a leading Rathor chieftain, kidnapped Ajit Singh from imperial custody in Delhi and dashed off to Jodhpur, Marwar’s capital, where the child was acclaimed the next Rathor raja. Since such defiance of imperial authority amounted to rebellion, in September 1679 ‘Alamgir moved the imperial court to Ajmer while his troops, following a precedent established in other Rajput states in such circumstances, occupied Jodhpur. The entire kingdom was placed under direct Mughal administration, pending resolution of the succession issue. The emperor also sent in imperial agents to prepare inventories of Jaswant Singh’s estate, since the property of any Mughal noble automatically reverted to the state upon his death.
The uprising did not remain confined to Marwar, however. With the Mughals occupying the Rathor capital of Jodhpur, Durga Das with the infant Ajit Singh took refuge in neighbouring Mewar, then ruled by Rana Raj Singh.51 In response, in November 1679 ‘Alamgir personally invaded Mewar only to find the Sisodiya capital of Udaipur vacated, as Rana Raj Singh and his entire cavalry had abandoned the plains for the hills. After nearly a year of Mughal–Sisodiya military stalemate, Raj Singh died and was succeeded by Jai Singh, who opposed his clan’s continued involvement in the Rathor succession struggle and negotiated a separate peace with ‘Alamgir. The emperor, in turn, confirmed Jai Singh in his position as Mewar’s raja and made him an imperial mansabdar with the rank of 5,000. For the rest of ‘Alamgir’s reign Mughal relations with Mewar remained cordial, with Sisodiya commanders and troops once again taking up imperial service throughout the empire.52 Meanwhile the Rathors of Marwar wearily came to accept rule by Mughal governors. But their relations remained strained, as Durga Das kept up a guerrilla resistance for another two decades, albeit with only desultory support from his kinsmen. Ultimately, by 1699 both Durga Das and Ajit Singh, by then an adult, had submitted to Mughal rule and become imperial mansabdars, formally ending Marwar’s rebellion against ‘Alamgir.53 But the long struggle had created an air of mutual distrust that lingered for decades.
The Rajput rebellion also led to ‘Alamgir’s fateful decision not to return to Delhi, but to continue south and conduct military operations in the Deccan. These operations would occupy his remaining twenty-five years of life and permanently alter the course of Mughal history. At the height of the Rajput rebellion, in mid 1680, the emperor had given the command of military campaigns in southern Marwar to his favourite son, Prince Akbar. But the prince, flushed with several battlefield victories and knowing how his father had usurped power from Shah Jahan, made the rash decision to confront ‘Alamgir for the Mughal throne. In this he was urged on by ‘Alamgir’s erstwhile enemies, Durga Das and Rana Raj Singh, who assured him that all Rajputs would certainly rally to his cause. So in early 1681 Akbar, accompanied by his newfound Rajput allies and addled by visions of the gem-studded Peacock Throne, declared himself emperor and marched the 200 kilometres to his father’s camp in Ajmer. On the eve of the battle, however, ‘Alamgir tricked the Rajputs into believing that Akbar was actually leading them into a trap. As a result, the prince awoke at dawn to find that all his Rajput allies had vanished, leaving him with just a few hundred men to face his furious father. Hastily backtracking, the prince caught up with Durga Das, who was dismayed to learn that ‘Alamgir had wiped an entire army off the field without shooting a single arrow. Finding that the Rajputs had no appetite for battling ‘Alamgir, Durga Das, together with Prince Akbar, marched south seeking asylum with any anti-Mughal community they could find.
They found that community south of the Vindhya Mountains, where anti-Mughal sentiment had been brewing for several decades. For his part, ‘Alamgir had greater plans than merely capturing his rebel son. Back in 1658, before leaving the Deccan to join the War of Succession, he had been on the cusp of annexing both Bijapur and Golconda and checking the nascent power of Maratha chieftains. For more than two decades as emperor, he continued to view these projects as unfinished business. Now, with his rebel son having fled into the arms of one of those adversaries, he had one more reason to pack his tents and, together with the entire court and a good part of the army, shift to the Deccan.